I got my hair cut by Grandpa Honky. He told me,

“With this cut, you look a bit like that boy, Dennis the Menace. He’s sure a cutie.”

He used the same scissors that he used to cut open popsicles, so my hair was always sticky after every cut. Clippings of my hair were put into a ziploc bag, and he went on about this urban legend he heard about keeping a bag of your own hair underneath your pillow to ward off the devil. I tossed the bag out the window on the highway after my mom picked me up. I watched the car behind us swerve to miss it and slam into a guardrail.

Grandpa Honky would get drunk and chase everyone around the house with a taser that he stole from a flea market. He wore a police cap. A Ricky Nelson album incessantly played from a cheap, purple boombox.

“A-be-bop baby
A-be-bop baby
A-be-bop baby
She’s the gal for me”

My cousin and I usually hid in a big plastic treasure chest that was mostly empty, aside from some baseballs and a box of old pocket knives. My grandma hit Grandpa Honky over the head with a mop handle once. He fell over laughing and rubbing the spot on his head where he was hit.

“Welp, she got me! Ah hahaha…granny got me good right in the noggin…yowch! That hurt haha goddamn it…,” he’d slur and garble to no one in particular.

My grandpa reminded me of ALF when he wasn’t drinking, his voice and mannerisms a carbon copy. His bedside table held chewing tobacco, inhalers, rifle manuals, and these playing cards with cartoons of nude women. Whenever he went to the bowling alley, I would sneak into his room and look at the Playboys, debating on trying the tobacco. It smelled like dust and musty t-shirts in there, and the windows had these amber curtains covering them at all times. A 12-gauge hung directly above my grandparents’ bed.

My grandpa had a collection of porno tapes in his closet next to his old bowling ball. I saw the image of a girl with stringy blonde hair and crucifix earrings getting fucked by a guy in sunglasses with a tattoo that said “EAT SHIT”. They were fucking on the hood of a car and I thought,

“I wonder how fast that car is going?”

When I was about 7, I spent the night at Grandpa Honky’s house and slept on the living room floor. I woke up at about 2 a.m. to some kind of porn parody of Grease playing on the TV. A T-Bird reject was fucking someone who was supposed to be Olivia Newton-John, but looked nothing like her, on a couch that looked like my grandparents’ sofa. You could just barely hear a soundtrack of generic funk instrumentals, the vocals replaced with moans, grunts, gasps, and breathing through teeth. When I turned my head and looked behind me, I saw Grandpa Honky masturbating on his couch. His face held the expression of disbelief, and the TV reflected in his glasses, obscuring his eyes. I heard him say,

“Lord, have mercy,”

shortly before he came and I went back to sleep.

In the morning, my grandma made pancakes. Grandpa Honky was late to breakfast, which was unusual. I walked past his bedroom and saw him sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at his slippers. He ran his fingers through his fine hair and twisted little knots in his white chest hair, before muttering,

“I wonder what’s on the TV tonight.”